The Ballad of Narayama

Food is short in a village in the mountains. The rule is this: whoever reaches seventy is taken out of the village and carried on their son's back to the mountain of Narayama. Orin is sixty nine. She is preparing. She finds her son Tatsuhei a new wife, settles her grandson's trouble and puts the house in order. Her teeth are sound and in this village that is a shame; an old woman should not be able to eat so well. She breaks them with a stone. Tatsuhei does not want to do it. Winter comes. One night they set off. Keisuke Kinoshita directs. Kinuyo Tanaka plays Orin and Teiji Takahashi plays Tatsuhei; Yūko Mochizuki and Seiji Miyaguchi are in the cast. It is a Japanese production, made in 1958. The source is Shichiro Fukazawa's story; the same story was filmed again by Shohei Imamura in 1983 and that version won a prize at Cannes. Kinoshita built the film in the manner of kabuki; the sets are openly stage sets and the light changes within a scene. A narrator sings to a shamisen and tells the events. The whole film was shot in a studio; no exteriors were used and the mountain is a set too. The matter it treats is scarcity; the custom is shown not as cruelty but as an arithmetic of survival. The narrative does not build the mother as a victim; she makes the decision and she persuades her son. In the last section the colour and light change and the scene becomes a rite. Its limit is form; the staging is artificial and the narrative is far from today's habits of realism. Who it is for: viewers who like classical Japanese cinema and formal experiment. Who it is not for: it is artificial, slow, and the ending heavy.